March 15, 2008

Asparagus Tips

Ms Packington, from Worcester, throws the asparagus spears onto the floor and makes her predictions based on how they land.

She says she stumbled across her asparagus-predicting skills a few years ago by chance, after some stalks fell on the floor and she made a prediction which came true.

As good a method as any other I suppose. Which is to say, totally useless. Half-assed, you might say. As useless as an Astrologer. I doubt it’s the dawning of the age of asparagus. Er, that’s all I got.

Reminds me of the sticks used in Chinese temples. Don't know what you call them, but they look very much like chopsticks, except they have some Chinese characters painted or engraved near the ends. The two or three dozen sticks are inside a bucket and you lift the sheaf of sticks a few inches and drop them back in. You keep doing this until one of them fails to drop all the way in and so sticks out. If I remember correctly you then bring that particular stick to the resident seer and s/he then reads your fortune or something.

Edwardson,
Yeah the Chinese are very into superstition. Even so far that sim-cards cost differently depending on the phone-number you will get (because some numbers bring luck and others bad luck). The price difference is up to 30 USD which is a lot of money in China.
Not falling for that kind of crap I of course bought the absolute cheapest sim-card I could find, consisting of all the "unlucky" numbers being repeated over and over again.
"Unfortunately" I lost my phone the next day, thus giving all my superstitious friends "evidence" for their beliefs.
AAARGH!

No, I am actually just an airhead who cannot keep an eye on my things.

Techskeptik - weirder still, some people have a gene that prevents them from smelling it. Seems a lot of people were saying "doesn't work with me" until some lab coat said "lets have a sniff then". So we have crazy venn diagrams of those who can't get the smelly pee, those that can't smell it and the overlaps.